Setting your movie in a restaurant is as close to punting as it gets in moviedom. Someone does it every couple of years (1998: Restaurant, 2000: Dinner Rush), and today they have all blended together into one enormous plate of mashed potatoes and warmed-over gravy.

And while I can understand how laziness can motivate a writer/director to base yet another movie on waitstaff working thankless jobs in a restaurant while dreaming of lives on the outside (just imagine how big the audience of waiters and waitresses must be!), I can't begin to fathom why he'd title that film In the Weeds -- and why a studio like Miramax would allow that title to stick on the eventual straight-to-DVD release that occurs five years after the film's production.

It's becoming pretty trendy to try to surprise the viewer. It seems like, every time I turn around, some critic friend of mine is blurbing about "a twist ending rivaling such-and-such film." The such-and-such is normally some not-that-obscure, not-that-old film such as The Usual Suspects, 12 Monkeys, The Sixth Sense. My personal favorite would be calling it a "Nowhere Man" ending, after the short-lived ultraparanoid UPN series about a photographer whose existence is erased. At the end of it all, he finds that he was never a photographer to begin with and that he is the head of the organization he has been fighting against and created a new identity and memories for himself so that the security of their conspiracies could be tested.

Deceiver may not be the latest in this trend of trying to trick us, but it is, like most of them, incredibly easy to predict. You see, when you've watched enough movies, you become immune to their tricks. You see through them, know the killer ten seconds in from their first facial expressions.